I bought a new HD and ran the recovery tool which gave me an option to clone from another drive. I figured I might as well give it a try even though the old HD seemed completely dead.
After a couple of hours the machine rebooted using the new HD. The amazing part is not only were are my files perfectly intact, but the exact same applications I had open when the old HD died opened up automatically on the new HD.
but even beyond that the sheer number of popups and shit I need to close when starting from a clean install on Windows makes me want to punch the computer, and naturally that is a very subjective experience. and stuff like apps stealing focus in general. if a mac app makes itself the key window in a non-standard way I immediately consider uninstalling it, on win that just seems to be what all apps do when opening new windows.
Not sure why it's suboptimal, WSL is amazing. I am primary a frontend dev as well and do most of my building / start-up / testing of my work inside of a terminal. It's great and Adobe works great as well with the added bonus of the better Windows dropdowns (Mac OS dropdowns drive me nuts but for Windows you can give one focus and scroll through all the options with the keyboard).
> but even beyond that the sheer number of popups and shit I need to close when starting from a clean install on Windows makes me want to punch the computer, and naturally that is a very subjective experience.
When I first started up I had like 2 notifications to use Edge and something else and that was it. When I enrolled in the Windows beta I received a few more for requests for feedback, which it warned me about ahead of time. Not sure why you had so many pop-ups and I've had basically none.
It's always so weird to me how my experience with Windows machines differs from those who prefer Macs. I own and use both and they both seem pretty great to me. The only big thing is I make sure to only buy Windows hardware from Microsoft to get their "genuine experience" because HP and everyone else likes to ruin it with their bullshit.
On my office laptop though, Win 10 Pro has been pretty stable.
To get back to the main point, I usually have to spend a day with both Windows and Linux to install everything right from VLC to compilers. IMO setting up needs to be done on every machine, independently of the OS.
Work MacBook - have to restart it to get USB ports to work, screen flickers when you plug in an external monitor like X windows on an Unix terminal from '99 with a bad conf file... Comeon.
But 1) i have to admit that i like all this full aluminum fuckery (shame on me) 2) MacOS is for me more "batteries included" then any Unix-Flavor. Yes there a often alternatives on Linux, still i really like to get my shit done quick and easy with tools like preview for example. 3) Better Tools on MacOS: There is some great stuff out there which help me in every way. Alfred, MailMate, MoneyMoney, Postico, Royal TSX, Paw, ... good looking, functional tools. And still i can use all the great command line tools out of the linux world (vim/emacs, bash/zsh, compiler tools, ranger for filenavigation, ...).
I just hope Apple gets their shit together.
In regards to tools, you can usually find a distro that is "batteries included", try KDE as your DE - There's great tools like Okular, Dolphin... Insomnia is a pretty looking Paw alternative etc, however I think the advantage with Linux is that you can often build it how you want, without the junk that is there and you don't even know what it does, but it consumes CPU cycles. Moreover, with distros like Arch Linux, you get practically all the available tools, always up to date, never have to reinstall, updates take a minute as opposed to half an hour and you can mange everything, (not just brew packages), with an awesome package manager.
I really don't want to say "MacOS > Unix" because of any reasons i mentioned. I also had ArchLinux as main OS on my Desktop, and also tried a new KDE Flavor.
But for me personally it was never as good as MacOS. Maybe i wasn't trying hard enough, or don't want to loose any spent $ on MacOS only software. Dunno. Anyway i just hope for myself that i can get a great MacBook again ;)
(What i missed the most on MacOS was always a fast and keyboard focused window manager like 2bwm. In the end i was able to recreate this behavior with hammerspoon and some custom lua scripts in combination with alfred. MacOS just looks sometimes a bit bloated with all these rounded egdes, drop shadows etc.)
(Sarcasm aside... I’d flip in a heartbeat but despite macOS’s lapses, every single time I had to deal with a Linux desktop I regretted it.)
That's the hardware's fault.
Fortunately you don't have to use systemd. I'm happily running Void Linux.
It displays some ignorance of this subject to blame it on systemd, when Matthew Garrett told people that it was really his fault.
* https://twitter.com/mjg59/status/693494314941288448
The people who relate the tale as if it were a systemd thing or something that the systemd people did are ill-informed. It was entirely a kernel thing. This was even stated outright at the time by the creator of that particular kernel mechanism.
To learn the real story, go and read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11152880 where Matthew Garrett xyrself can be found participating in the discussion.
I remember a guy at Uni who’d come to the study room, update the various spyware, malware sigs and let the Win machine purge itself for half an hour, while he had coffe and cigarettes.
Since several years, my biggest hassle has been to plug a TM backup and choose “restore from backup” when I bought a new Mac.
Drivers, power management, tweaking this-and-that... nope, my life demands those minutes back. I’m actively worried when I see Apple fuck up and potentially ruin this status quo because “innovation”.